Mere Comments: Translating “Know”

Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments talks about Bible translation:

I don’t have a fully fleshed out theory of translation. If I were pressed, I’d say that the virtue most required of a translator is a kind of reticence—or you might call it a chaste restraint, or linguistic humility. The translator should repeat the words of John the Baptist: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” That restraint will suggest that the translator ought rather to err on the side of literalness; he will sense how often there is something precious in the literal meaning of the text, and will not want to lose that, even when a figurative rendering seems clearer at first glance, and more natural for the receiving language. For strangeness too is a teacher.

He goes on to discuss how to translate the Hebrew euphemism in Genesis 4: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived…” He prefers translations that don’t replace the Hebrew euphemism with an English one:

What is lost [when changing the euphemism]? For starters, an entire world of thinking foreign to ours. “Adam knew his wife, and she bore him a son….” It suggests that sexual love is, at heart, a matter of knowing, and there is no reason why that knowing must extend only to the body….

And there’s more still. When Gabriel announces the great news to Mary, the young girl replies that she doesn’t understand how that can be, since, as the New American Bible has it, she has no relations with a man. It’s the same clinical phrase; and I defy anybody to insist that something so flat and banal can possibly halt the reader in his tracks. The original did just that (I am on spring break and do not have the Greek text with me, so I am going out on a bit of a limb here): I know not man. Strange, sure. And that’s precisely the point. Its very strangeness encourages us, as Luke intends, to connect this moment, the last in Scripture in which know will be so used, with that initial knowledge of man and woman after the Fall.

People don’t usually use “know” this way in English. The question for any Bible translator is what to do with the expression: translate the words or interpret the meaning for the reader? Esolen argues for the former.

The ESV keeps the Hebrew euphemism “know” in Genesis 4 and elsewhere. It translates Luke 1:34 as, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” and adds the footnote “Greek since I do not know a man.” (Compare the RSV: “How shall this be, since I have no husband?”)

Via The 7 Habitus.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Translation. Both comments and pings are currently closed.